And for whom did he reserve it? For the righteous in the time to come, for it is said (Gen 1:4): “And God saw the light, that it was good” and ‘good’ means only the righteous, for it is said: “Say of the righteous that he is good.” כיון שראה אור שגנזו לצדיקים שמח, שנאמר אור צדיקים ישמח. Eleazar said: The light which the Holy One, blessed be He, created on the first day, one could see thereby from one end of the world to the other but as soon as the Holy One, blessed be He, beheld the generation of the Flood and the generation of the Dispersion, and saw that their actions were corrupt, He arose and hid it from them, for it is said (Job 38:15): “But from the wicked their light is withheld.” ולמי גנזו - לצדיקים לעתיד לבא שנאמר וירא אלהים את האור כי טוב, ואין טוב אלא צדיק, שנאמר אמרו צדיק כי טוב. Hagigah 12a, modified Soncino trans.): ואור ביום ראשון איברי? והכתיב ויתן אתם אלהים ברקיע השמים וכתיב ויהי ערב ויהי בקר יום רביעי! But was the light created on the first day? For, behold, it is written: “And God set them in the firmament of the heaven,” and it is written: “And there was evening and there was morning a fourth day”?! כדרבי אלעזר.

The Babylonian Talmud suggests that God originally created a very special light on day one, but that He hid that light and replaced it with sunlight because he saw that people would be too sinful to deserve the original special light (b. Traditional Interpretations The Buried Light – The Midrashic-Kabbalistic Solution Nevertheless, the contradiction between day one and day four was apparent to traditional commentators for millennia. cannot refer to what we mean by a day but must refer to some unspecified long period of time.Īdmittedly, the impossibility of the creation account, which bears virtually no resemblance in its understanding of the universe to modern notions, is only a problem for modern, scientifically minded people.

In the modern day creationist lingo, this problem spawned what is called the “Day-Age Theory,” i.e., that “day 1, day 2,” etc. This problem is often touted as proof that this text is meant as an allegory and not to be taken literally. But the distinction between day and night is already noted in day one! Moreover, if the sun was only created on day four, and the sun is what determines day and night, as we all know, then what is the light on day one? Here, God creates the sun and the moon to separate day from night and to shine upon the earth. 1:18 to dominate the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. 1:16 God made the two great lights, the greater light to dominate the day and the lesser light to dominate the night, and the stars. 1:15 and they shall serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth.' And it was so. However, on day four, God seems to do the same thing again. The light that God creates at the very beginning divides the time in the world between day and night this is used to define each of the following days of creation. 1:5 God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night… 1:4 God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. 1:3 God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light.

Hebrew and then there was light